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Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Originally Posted by Ikari

Exactly! Why pay a man 15 bucks/hour in America when you can make some kid in China do it for 35 cents/day. Why pay for environmental protection when you can get some country that has no quarrels polluting the earth and dumping toxic chemicals in the water. It's a lot cheaper when you don't have to pay your workers or clean up after yourself.

Originally Posted by MildSteel

I think the days of economies based on mechanized technology are numbered. The environment will simply not support it. Either we will run the environment in the ground and people will start to die off in large numbers and it will stop, or humans will realize it's simply not sustainable and return to a sustainable, agrarian based economy. That's what's coming.

The world will NOT turn back an agrarian economy. That is simply not an option.
Mechanized economics is the only way to go. If the USA would not have had the powerful union laws it had, the industries would have mechanized and automated and more of the labor would be done by machines than by people and there would still be a good manufacturing base in the USA. Also, it would also go greener because why not. And they wouldn't be moving to China. But they have and that's that and because China doesn't care about the environment, 21% of all cancer cases reported globally are in china.

The future is technological. it may not be those beautiful white cities with the cool looking buildings and trams that go fast on lines in all directions in our lifetimes... but at some point in some places in the world, that's coming. Heck, China made enormous efforts to make their cities greener too. So have all the western countries.
Green tech, green energy, smart computers and automated industry.

Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Originally Posted by MildSteel

Economists have advocated the notion of comparative advantage to advance the cause of free trade. The idea is that group A can produce a commodity B more efficiently than group C. C can produce commodity D more efficiently than A. Therefore A and C should trade B and D instead of trying to produce it themselves. It sounds good in theory, but when applied on a global level between nations, problems can arise.

Today we see the United States runs a huge trade deficit with China as a result of the implementation of such ideas. In fact the United States does not have sufficient commodities or manufactured goods to trade with China. The deficit is only maintained because China is willing to accept US dollars as payment for it's goods.

This arrangement has resulted in the loss of US jobs to other countries which has hurt many Americans. Not only that but it has increased the debt of individual Americans and the US government.

So the question is, has free trade been good for the United States?

It is not the free trade that is a problem.

I do not want to be boring and go into too much detail. But fixing or pegging currencies against each other causes vast problems. We saw, what fixed rates do, when Bretton Woods collapsed and it was just demonstrated by Euroland, where the fixed rates have caused 15 years of successive miseries.

That the Chinese or Eurocrats have verbose explanations why their's is an exception to reality is for fooks.

Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Is free trade good for the United States? Who is the United States?
It's good for business.
It's not good for the average American employee.
Do the poor matter?
If the poor starve how does that hurt the rich? Which is considered "the United States" the rich or the poor?
The corporate states of America will flourish if we don't pander to the weak. If we allow the weak to die off leaving more resources to those at the the top our country will become stronger. The question is who in the united states matter so we know who it is we are talking about when you say United States.

Islam is an antiquated religion and needs to either modernize with the times or be completely eradicated.
There are two types of Muslims, terrorists, and their enablers. They need to fix that if they want to be part of civilized society.

Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Originally Posted by Dezaad

I said that economists regularly recognize that free trade can benefit only a few. To restate in a more words: In some cases free trade can result in benefiting only the few, while in other cases it can result in benefiting the majority.

I'm sorry. I misunderstood.

Originally Posted by Dezaad

Here is one quote that I thought was interesting: "Many economists continue to believe that increased foreign trade is a rising tide that will eventually lift all boats." I sometimes laugh heartily when economists coldly calculate the impact of economics on regular people. Notice the weasel word 'eventually' in that sentence. With that word in the sentence, I actually believe that the sentence is true in probably 100% of cases. But 'eventually' can be a significant amount of time. In bad situations it can be 50 or more years. And things can really suck pretty damn bad, and get worse for a while, for a significant portion of a people. But, it always immediately benefits wealthy people. In such cases, free trade should hardly be called good economic policy, whatever the eventual benefits.

I agree with what you have said here with the exception that 100 percent of the time it will lift all boats. I think what it eventually does 100 percent of the time is to level out an uneven situation between two economies. For example, I think the outsourcing of labor will eventually have the effect of driving down wages here until they are in equilibrium with the other countries. Something that will be very painful for people living here.

Originally Posted by Dezaad

I became a computer programmer, because I knew that the career would likely ride out the tides that I knew were coming to our middle classes. Now those tides have arrived, and I have been doing dandy while others struggle. It is easy for me to take some solace on behalf of those others in the fact that those tides will eventually lift all boats. But I would nevertheless sorely hate to be one of them. And I could be, should conditions change and my strategy ultimately fail.

That's interesting. What sort of programming do you do and what languages do you use?

Originally Posted by Dezaad

The American people have been sold a load of bull**** about the way this whole globalization deal was going to work out for them. It was largely sold to them through manipulative storytelling based on oversimplified views of the way economics works.

I agree with you. I also think that economists put too much faith in the theory of comparative advantage. Like I said, I think one big flaw is that it assumes that everyone can engage in the production of the goods that might be most efficiently produced by an economy. And that simply is not the case. Not everyone in the US is cut out to be an aerospace engineer.

Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Originally Posted by vasuderatorrent

It could be but we don't like it. America is having trouble adjusting to our new status as second, third, fourth or fifth place in the world.

There has always been free trade whether we like it or not. You can make laws but people will break them when it comes to making money. America is about to see a big boom again once we accept our different role(s) in the world economy.

We'll be fine. Free Trade is bad in the short run. For example: If I have the only grocery store in town and someone opens a new grocery store next door, that would be very bad for the grocery store owner but very good for the community.

The temporary losers will always cry foul because they enjoy being in an advantaged position. What the temporary loser doesn't realize is that competition allows the grocery to become even better and better. There is no room for mediocre service or mediocre quality when there is competetion.

Free Trade is great for the United States. We just have to give it time to ride the bumpy waves of transition.

I don't think the big problem is so much quality, although in some cases that is true. The problem is that there are simply different costs and standards of living. As a result of that, US workers are at a disadvantage.

Like I said to someone else, I can only see wages being driven down here as a result, as well as standards of living. I don't think that is good.

Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Originally Posted by Rainman05

The world will NOT turn back an agrarian economy. That is simply not an option.
Mechanized economics is the only way to go. If the USA would not have had the powerful union laws it had, the industries would have mechanized and automated and more of the labor would be done by machines than by people and there would still be a good manufacturing base in the USA. Also, it would also go greener because why not. And they wouldn't be moving to China. But they have and that's that and because China doesn't care about the environment, 21% of all cancer cases reported globally are in china.

The future is technological. it may not be those beautiful white cities with the cool looking buildings and trams that go fast on lines in all directions in our lifetimes... but at some point in some places in the world, that's coming. Heck, China made enormous efforts to make their cities greener too. So have all the western countries.
Green tech, green energy, smart computers and automated industry.

China has very few labor and environmental laws. I don't buy that this is all fault of the Union. Its easier for corporations to support child labor and massive pollution than to pay the engineers to automate a work force. So long as they have the reasonable option to use cheap labor, they will not tech up.

You know the time is right to take control, we gotta take offense against the status quo

Originally Posted by A. de Tocqueville

"I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it."

Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Originally Posted by Rainman05

The world will NOT turn back an agrarian economy. That is simply not an option.
Mechanized economics is the only way to go. If the USA would not have had the powerful union laws it had, the industries would have mechanized and automated and more of the labor would be done by machines than by people and there would still be a good manufacturing base in the USA. Also, it would also go greener because why not. And they wouldn't be moving to China. But they have and that's that and because China doesn't care about the environment, 21% of all cancer cases reported globally are in china.

The future is technological. it may not be those beautiful white cities with the cool looking buildings and trams that go fast on lines in all directions in our lifetimes... but at some point in some places in the world, that's coming. Heck, China made enormous efforts to make their cities greener too. So have all the western countries.
Green tech, green energy, smart computers and automated industry.

I don't agree with you. It may take a devastating event like a nuclear war to make it happen, but it will happen eventually. The large scale use of technology requires the use of limited resources such as metals, oil, coal, uranium, chemicals, etc. These things cannot be replaced as rapidly as they are used when there is the large scale use of technology. Then there is the harm to the environment itself that will render it unsuitable to sustain life.

Furthermore, the technology itself becomes dangerous. Like I said, unless the leaders of the world change, it is very likely that there will be a big nuclear war. There would be very little left in North America that would be able to sustain human life. The human race would survive, but there would have to be some drastic changes in the way we live.

Re: Has free trade been good for the United States?

Originally Posted by joG

It is not the free trade that is a problem.

I do not want to be boring and go into too much detail. But fixing or pegging currencies against each other causes vast problems. We saw, what fixed rates do, when Bretton Woods collapsed and it was just demonstrated by Euroland, where the fixed rates have caused 15 years of successive miseries.

That the Chinese or Eurocrats have verbose explanations why their's is an exception to reality is for fooks.

If the Chinese didn't to that we would cheat them by devaluing the dollar. It's a problem for us because we have to pay back the money that we borrowed because we don't have enough to trade. And that is a result of the difference in wages and as some have pointed out different environmental and safety standards.